Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

If Labour comes third in next week's elections, Ed Miliband is finished

PMQ’s has just finished, and it was a strange one. Nothing major happened. There were no great sound bites, or knockout blows. But it was a bad session for Ed Miliband. Seriously bad.

All the usual caveats. No one in the real world watches PMQs. David Cameron was basking in the glow of the latest set of positive economic figures. Labour’s leader asked a series of perfectly sensible questions on Pfizer.

But something happened. Or rather, something didn’t happen. Miliband would ask a question and David Cameron would just bat it away. Then he’d ask another question. And Cameron would just bat it away, again.

I was initially going to write that Ed Miliband appeared to just be going through the motions. But it was worse than that. He was actually trying really, really hard. At one point he got genuinely, and uncharacteristically, angry. But it had zero impact. Miliband looked a bit like a child who is held at arms length by a grown man, and keeps frantically flailing away.

Ed Miliband has had poor parliamentary performances before. There was the final PMQs session just after Cameron had returned from delivering his euro veto when the PM made a joke about his brother. Labour MPs went off looking very, very worried. There was his Syria speech, that got taken apart by the Tory back benches. And of course his recent disastrous response to the Budget.

But this wasn’t like any of the above examples. There wasn’t an instant when you thought, “Ouch, that was painful”. Instead, Miliband just seemed to gradually fade away as the session went on.

The context for today was obviously the disappearance of Labour’s poll lead. The Tories were upbeat, while the Labour benches were understandably muted.

But there was something else going on. For the first time I sensed that Labour MPs are starting to give up on their leader.

I’ve written several times that despite all of his problems, I was certain that Miliband would lead his party into the next election. I’m not certain any more.

It’s probable that he will. There is no clear alternative. The mechanism for removing him is complex. Labour does not have a great history of successful leadership coups.

But while I can’t yet see how Miliband would be removed, I also can’t see how Labour can carry on the way it is. It’s not that Miliband is making any catastrophic blunders. He just seems to be drifting into irrelevance.

Next week's euro elections were supposed to be a defining moment for David Cameron. Instead I think they’ve become the defining moment for Ed Miliband. If Labour tops the poll – unlikely but not impossible – the pressure will ease. If, as I suspect, Labour comes second, then he may be able to limp on to defeat in 2015. But if Labour were somehow to come third – as this week’s ICM poll predicted – then I genuinely think we could be looking at the end of Ed Miliband’s leadership.